Throwing plastic milk bottles and yogurt tubs into the blue bin is old hat when it comes to recycling, but a Sheboygan start-up company has piloted a system designed to keep more kinds of plastic out of landfills.

Zeus Recycling Solutions developed a baler, no bigger than a tall garbage can, that manually compresses oversize plastic wrap into small, compact bundles. That eases the recycling process and makes trucking it more efficient.

Zeus is paying hospitals and beer distributors to take away their plastic, which is then pelletized and remade into a variety of goods - from tote bags to blue bins to mattress covers.

"It's cash for trash," said Jim Theodoroff, co-founder and vice president of the business that launched four years ago. "And they're saving at the other end because they really don't need the frequency of waste haulers coming in and hauling out the garbage."

Theodoroff, who started this business while running his family's fast-food restaurant in Sheboygan, said he piloted the concept with a beverage distributor in the She boygan area.

The kinds of plastic that Zeus specializes in are shrink-wrap used by beverage companies to package oversize skids of their products.

Case in point: Milwaukee's Lakefront Brewery. The brewery was told shrink-wrap couldn't be recycled, but now it can.

That has helped the brewery's Hubbard St. warehouse shift from an 8-yard Dumpster to a 2-yard Dumpster, with much less frequent pickups, said Dan Alexsandrowicz, Lakefront vice president of tax and compliance.

Beer brewed at Lakefront is shipped from the distribution center to 35 states and five countries, he said. The brewery is working to become as sustainable as possible. It provides its spent grain for use in compost by Will Allen's Growing Power, and Lakefront President Russ Klisch hosts "environmental brewery tours" every Friday.

A good fit

Zeus was launched when the fast-food business slowed and Theodoroff looked into business opportunities in the recycling sector.

Internet searches took him to a health care industry "white paper" about the hurdles to recycling the plastic wrap used for sterilized medical supplies.

The wrap, known as sterilization wrap or blue wrap, can be used only once and then must be tossed - or recycled.

The white paper noted that hospitals are short on space, lack forklifts and need an on-site system that can compress the wrap into tightly compressed bundles.

That was a good fit for the baler Theodoroff was tinkering with in his warehouse - one that is now made for Zeus by a contract-manufacturing firm in De Pere.

"If you have a 600-bed hospital, they'll have 230 pounds of polypropylene waste per day, or 42 tons a year, of just blue wrap," said Kim Roth, director of central sterilization at the Marquette University School of Dentistry.

Marquette was using a different product to keep its dental tools sterile - one that had to be thrown away - but wanted to switch to the blue wrap. Roth said she didn't want to switch to blue wrap until she could find a way to keep all the school's plastic out of the landfill.

The dental school uses more than 52,000 large sheets of blue wrap a year, she said.

"This is just good sustainability for health care, instead of throwing it in the trash," Roth said.

That's significant because the blue sterilization wrap takes 400 years to biodegrade once it's sent to the landfill, she said.

Closing the loop

Once the blue wrap leaves Marquette, it is picked up by Zeus and taken to a company that makes the wrap into pellets and converts it into other products, such as plastic tubs or "lumber" for decking. Zeus started working with Blue 2 Green, a Massachusetts firm that makes tote bags and clothing from blue wrap pellets.

"It just kind of closes the loop," Theodoroff said.

The baler, priced at $1,495 each, has found other uses, including on the farm. Farmers are using it to bale hay, tumbleweed and one farmer in Utah is even using it to compress clover that will be used to feed horses, said Brady Zufelt, Zeus sales manager.

Zufelt says one of the selling points of the baler is its simplicity - no gears, no motors, and little heft.

"It weighs around 110 pounds and moves like a little hand truck," he said. "And it doesn't really add any extra steps, per se. You use it like a garbage can - kind of like a bottomless garbage can, if you keep compressing it."

Privately held Zeus has two employees, but Theodoroff said orders have been good and the company hopes to add two or three more people by the end of the year.

"We're not subsidized by any means of government money," Theodoroff said. "It's a start-up that we all put our money into, to try to create something in a downturn economy and make a difference."